Among the advisers I speak to, the main reaction to the FCA’s Mills Review, has been unease, says Stuart Breyer, CEO, mallowstreet. At first glance, a 147-page report from the regulator on AI reshaping retail finance by 2030 reads like a warning that machines are coming for financial advice. In my view, that reading is wrong, and it is costing firms the chance to see what the report actually hands them. Digest properly and the Mills Review is the strongest case for growth the profession has had in years.
Start with the number at the report’s centre. Only around nine per cent of UK adults take regulated financial advice in any given year. That is not a saturated market. It is one where more than nine in ten people in the whole country go without the thing financial advisers are trained to provide – construction of a clear financial strategy for an individual. Mills says plainly that closing that gap is the prize, and that AI is the most credible route to achieving it the regulator has seen. “If you read this as a threat, the report falls to land its point”
The reason why the gap has stayed has nothing to do with willingness: advisers want to serve more people; they simply do not have the hours. Every conversation I have with firm leaders comes back to that. Consumer Duty, which I support, has raised the cost of every client interaction: better records, clearer outcomes evidence, tighter audit trails. At the same time the workforce has thinned. FCA register data analysed by Begbies Traynor shows the UK has lost more than 15 per cent of its advisory firms since early 2022, with experienced advisers dwindling and new entrants under 25 at near record lows. The bar has gone up at the same time – the people available to clear it have gone down.
You can see it in who is being turned away. The Lang Cat’s 2025 research found that half of UK advice firms have stopped serving some clients since Consumer Duty arrived, with offboarding at individual firms reaching 17 per cent. So, the advice gap is not just failing to close – in the mid-market it is being widened, client by client, by firms that have run out of hours.
And here is the part that the report misses. For every hour an adviser spends with a client, roughly two hours follow in admin: file notes, suitability letters, compliance checks. That ratio is the real ceiling on how many people a firm can look after properly. Compliant, auditable AI, built for regulated advice rather than borrowed from a general chatbot, gets straight to the heat of the issue. Our own SOFI by Numbers data shows advisers who use purpose-built tools save more than three hours a week. Over a year, that is more than 150 hours – close to 13 working days per adviser – freed up to spend more time advising clients.
None of that is abstract. A day a fortnight per adviser is the difference between a firm that has to let its mid-tier clients go and one that can take on the clients other firms are shedding. The capacity the market is busy capacity AI can give back. The firms that adopt AI now and deliberately put the time into seeing more people rather than letting it soak away as slack, are the ones that will pick up the clients being offloaded.
One distinction matters here, and Mills draws it for us. The advice gap will not be closed by handing consumers a chatbot. The report is candid about the danger of general-purpose AI giving people advice-like answers outside the regulatory perimeter, with nobody accountable when it goes wrong. That is not advice, and advisers should give it no ground. The gap closes when regulated, human advisers serve more people to the same standard, supported by AI trained on regulated financial dialogue rather than scraped from the open web, and holding a named person responsible for every recommendation. Firm by firm, adviser by adviser.
So, what does a firm actually do with the report? Three things. Firstly, measure your own admin-to-client ratio honestly, because you cannot manage a constraint you have never put a number on. Next, be deliberate about the tools you choose, because generic AI trained on the open web is not built for regulated advice, and it shows exactly where Consumer Duty is strictest. And lastly, treat the time you get back as a growth decision, not a cost saving. Reinvested, it is new capacity. Left alone, it is slack.
The Mills Review asks whether AI can close the advice gap. The sharper question is the one it puts to your firm: when the capacity comes back, will you use it to serve the people the rest of the market is giving up on? The advice gap will not close in a policy document. It will close in the advice firms that decide to grow into it.
Stuart Breyer is CEO of mallowstreet who are behind SOFI – an AI platform serving the UK pensions, wealth and advice ecosystem.
